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The Academy of American Poets is the largest membership-based nonprofit organization fostering an appreciation for contemporary poetry and supporting American poets. For over three generations, the Academy has connected millions of people to great poetry through programs such as National Poetry Month, the largest literary celebration in the world; Poets.org, the Academy’s popular website; American Poets, a biannual literary journal; and an annual series of poetry readings and special events. Since its founding, the Academy has awarded more money to poets than any other organization.

Poems for Tragedy and Grief

Posted

February 21, 2014

Tragedy and grief can be encountered privately or publicly, felt in secret or experienced and expressed as a community. Poems of tragedy and grief address the occasions where words are difficult, from personal heartbreak to the Vietnam War to September 11, illuminating and sanctifying private and public loss. These poems try to help us to heal, or give us wisdom, or lend support in time of need. If they don’t say the unsayable, then they attempt it valiantly, speaking when we are afraid to speak, and bravely giving a voice to a collective grief.

In his poem "Facing It," Yusef Komunyakaa, a veteran of the Vietnam War, remembers his experience visiting Maya Lin’s Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C.:

...I turnthis way--the stone lets me go.I turn that way--I'm insidethe Vietnam Veterans Memorialagain, depending on the lightto make a difference.I go down the 58,022 names,half-expecting to findmy own in letters like smoke.I touch the name Andrew Johnson;I see the booby trap's white flash.Names shimmer on a woman's blousebut when she walks awaythe names stay on the wall.

In this lyrical poem, Komunyakaa identifies both the public nature of the tragedy--the 58,022 names immortalized on the Memorial Wall--and his personal loss. He is inside the memorial in the poem, his reflection implicating him and including him in the tragedy. Yet when the light shifts, the names of the lost still remain.

After the attacks of September 11, there was an outpouring of national grief and an uncharacteristic attention to poetry. Almost overnight, collections of poems were gathered on the various corners of the internet, some famous, some new. There seemed to be pressure on well-known poets to produce a poem, or refuse the opportunity, as the new Poet Laureate Billy Collins did, saying in an interview with NPR that the occasion was "too stupendous" for a single poem to handle. He said that the terrorists had done something "beyond language."

In Robert Frost’s poem, "Out, Out--" he expresses the more personal grief of the loss of a child when his hand is cut off by a buzz saw. However, it differs from a simple elegy in that it seeks to express the effect of the loss on the people around the child:

They listened to his heart.Little - less - nothing! - and that ended it.No more to build on there. And they, since theyWere not the one dead, turned to their affairs.

As scholars dungeoned in an ignorant ageTended the embers of the Trojan fire.Cities shall suffer siege and some shall fall,But man's not taken. What the deep heart means,Its message of the big, round, childish hand,Its wonder, its simple lonely cry,The bloodied envelope addressed to you,Is history, that wide and mortal pang.

Tragedy and grief are motifs not exclusive to contemporary poetry. From certain passages of Homer’s Iliad, to the war poems of W. B. Yeats, to the devastating loss and the accompanying erosion of speech expressed in T. S. Eliot’s "The Wasteland," there is an endless poetic return to the subjects of loss and tragedy. Here are a few poems that begin to give voice to the things beyond speech: